Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Google's December Authorship
Shake-up'
Posted by Dr-Pete
Back in mid-December, the newly launched MozCast Feature Graph showed a
significant short-term drop in the number of tracked searches displaying
authorship mark-up. Here's a 30-day view of the data (from November 22, 2013 to
December 21):
The graph shows the percentage of queries that displayed authorship mark-up
(to any degree) on page 1 of Google (note: the Y-axis has been constrained to
the range of the data). This data ranges from a peak of 23.71% on Nov. 24 to a
low of 20.03% on Dec. 19, a relative drop of 15.5%.
Was it foretold at Pubcon?
If you follow the search industry closely, that 15% may sound familiar. Back
in October, Matt Cutts took the stage at Pubcon and suggested that a 10-15%
reduction in authorship seemed to improve search quality. Many took this as a
sign that Google had reduced the amount of authorship mark-up appearing in SERPs
or would reduce it soon.
The graph above is a bit cherry-picked, in terms of the timeframe. So, let's
expand it to 60 days, including Matt's announcement at Pubcon (which happened on
Oct. 23):
Interestingly, authorship actually climbed a bit after Matt's announcement,
before eventually dropping. There was a 9.6% relative drop from Oct. 23 to Dec.
19. These numbers all line up pretty well with Matt's predicted 10-15% range,
and he confirmed around Dec. 19 that the authorship change had rolled out. Since
Dec. 19, authorship presence in our data set has ranged from 19.8% to 20.3%.
There has been no substantial recovery.
Did authorship counts drop?
When you think about a reduction in authorship, there are actually two very
different possible interpretations. You could see what the graphs above show
â that, overall, less searches displayed authorship mark-up. These graphs
only indicate whether queries had authorship mark-up or didn't, in all-or-none
fashion.
The other possible interpretation is that, within the searches that displayed
authorship mark-up, fewer results would get that mark-up. So, let's compare the
peak date of Nov. 24 to the 60-day low of Dec. 19. The following table breaks
down the searches with authorship by the count of results that displayed
authorship mark-up (as a percentage of the total searches with authorship):
The vast majority of SERPs, before and after the shake-up, displayed one
result with authorship mark-up. There aren't really any major differences until
you get down to 5/page, and at that point the number of data points is so small
that it's difficult to say the difference is meaningful. The mean number of
results displaying authorship mark-up on Nov. 24 was 1.326, which fell slightly
to 1.305 on Dec. 19.
There was a slight shift toward searches where only one result showed mark-up,
but the general proportions remained roughly the same in our data set. If you're
curious, the query that broke the 10/10 mark was "best android phones" (although
I'm currently only seeing 8 results with mark-up for that search).
Which searches lost mark-up?
Between Nov. 23 and Dec. 19, 628 searches lost authorship mark-up in our data
set. For reference, here's a set of 20 relatively high-volume queries from that
list of 628:
vpn
bruce springsteen
tractor supply
nectar
astrology
fisher price
pilates
gadgets
linksys
ie8
acne
hernia
multiple sclerosis
malaria
copd
crohn's disease
tattoo designs
command and conquer
web design
fashion bug
It can be tempting to dive right in and try to find some patterns, but here's
where things start to get tricky. If you do the math, you may notice that the
drop in percentages only suggests about 370 searches losing authorship mark-up.
So, how did we end up with a list of 628 keywords? It turns out that 260
keywords actually gained authorship mark-up during the same period. So, while
there was a significant net loss, there were both winners and losers.
It's also worth noting that many of these queries have a news component and
probably a QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) aspect to them, so the day-to-day
presence of authorship mark-up can vary with the actual results returned. This
calculation is almost certainly done in real-time and can be highly dynamic.
Google doesn't have a list of domains that either get authorship mark-up or
don't â they're making a decision on the fly based on the interaction of
the query, page, and domain.
What can you do about it?
It's important to realize that, while losing authorship mark-up for some of
your search terms may be upsetting, this is not a penalty in the traditional
sense. Google has lowered the volume, so to speak â they seem to feel that
authorship was too prominent and that the quality bar may have been set a little
too low.
So, if you lost mark-up, does that mean your site is necessarily low quality?
No, at least not in the sense you or I understand the word. It's more likely
that Google was awarding authorship mark-up simply based on on-page tags or
superficial factors and wasn't looking at how those factors were supported by
other ranking signals. So, you may need a bit more corroborating evidence (a
solid link profile, social mentions, etc.) to get your authorship to be
recognized.
Ultimately, authorship mark-up is a nice-to-have, but don't bet the farm on
it. Google+ is only 2-1/2 years old, and Google is just beginning to understand
how to measure authorship and individual authority (what some people call
"AuthorRank", although that implies a specific metric that may or may not exist
yet). Improving your individual authority and building your social profiles
makes sense for many reasons, but getting hung up on the micro-details of
authorship mark-up and watching it appear and disappear day-by-day is probably
only going to drive you crazy.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/KFFqrxbHrro/googles-december-authorship-shake-up
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Thursday, 9 January 2014
[Build Backlinks Online] This May Be the Most Daring Holiday Social Media Content Yet
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'This May Be the Most Daring
Holiday Social Media Content Yet'
Just when you thought the holidays were over, Im urging you to indulge me in one
more post on seasonal social media content. As a thank you for your patience,
Ive sourced something hilarious. If youve never heard of or followed Innocent
Drinks, a wholesome smoothie, juice and veggie pots brand based out of the
[]This May Be the Most Daring Holiday Social Media Content Yet is a post from:
Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/daring-holiday-social-media-content/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=daring-holiday-social-media-content
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Holiday Social Media Content Yet'
Just when you thought the holidays were over, Im urging you to indulge me in one
more post on seasonal social media content. As a thank you for your patience,
Ive sourced something hilarious. If youve never heard of or followed Innocent
Drinks, a wholesome smoothie, juice and veggie pots brand based out of the
[]This May Be the Most Daring Holiday Social Media Content Yet is a post from:
Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/daring-holiday-social-media-content/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=daring-holiday-social-media-content
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
[Build Backlinks Online] The Surprising Places Marketers Plan to Increase Budgets in 2014
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Surprising Places Marketers
Plan to Increase Budgets in 2014'
Marketers are evidently enthusiastic heading into 2014.about everything. A
fascinating new study was released this morning from Salesforce ExactTarget
Marketing Cloud (a client of Convince & Convert). Called 2014 State of
Marketing, insights from over 2,500 global marketers, the report is full of data
about marketers outlook and plans for the coming year. Several interesting []The
Surprising Places Marketers Plan to Increase Budgets in 2014 is a post from:
Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-research-2/the-surprising-places-marketers-plan-to-increase-budgets-in-2014/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-surprising-places-marketers-plan-to-increase-budgets-in-2014
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Plan to Increase Budgets in 2014'
Marketers are evidently enthusiastic heading into 2014.about everything. A
fascinating new study was released this morning from Salesforce ExactTarget
Marketing Cloud (a client of Convince & Convert). Called 2014 State of
Marketing, insights from over 2,500 global marketers, the report is full of data
about marketers outlook and plans for the coming year. Several interesting []The
Surprising Places Marketers Plan to Increase Budgets in 2014 is a post from:
Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-research-2/the-surprising-places-marketers-plan-to-increase-budgets-in-2014/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-surprising-places-marketers-plan-to-increase-budgets-in-2014
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] Storytelling Through Data: A New Inbound Marketing & SEO Report Structure
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Storytelling Through Data: A New
Inbound Marketing & SEO Report Structure'
Posted by ajfriedThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the
main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.
No matter what business you are in, it's a pretty sure thing that someone is
going to want to monitor how efficiently and productively you are working. Being
able to show these results over time is crucial to maintaining the health of the
long-term relationship.
To us, reporting has become much less about the data, and more about the story
you can tell with it. Not to say that data isn't important, but while a big
spike in traffic is awesome, the drop that comes after it might not necessarily
be a bad thing. It could be seasonal. Or maybe it's just leveling back after the
brand was mentioned in a news report. To be totally honest, the same thing could
apply to the spike itself, so hold off on those celebrations!
For the sake of transparency, this is something that we always felt we could
improve on more at Kahena. We have tried it all, from email write ups, to using
straight ranking reports (blerg, I know - so 2007), to a template-based Excel
model (which is what we currently use), and even as far as planning a future
web-based reporting platform for all of our clients to log in to and utilize as
needed.
This whole project really started in the wake of Google blocking all keyword
data and turning it all into [not provided]. This really forced us to break old
and bad habits and redefine what important metrics and insights we were sharing
with clients.
We had two goals in mind during this project which were to:
Automate the report as much as possible so that we have more time to analyze the
data and provide deeper, more valuable insights, both for our clients and our
own internal strategies.
Keep the template intact so there was standardization across our reports.
Categorizing all the data
We held a brainstorm and decided to compartmentalize the data into 3 different
categories:
KPIs: These are the key performance indicators that we felt show bottom line
progress from the campaign.
Leading Indicators: These metrics add value to the story by exhibiting a
correlation with the KPIs. These are all things that clients need to know to
understand the KPI outcomes.
Nice to know: These metrics don't necessarily make or break the campaign, but
are notable and worth mentioning because they provide some insight into overall
performance.
Here's what the brainstorm looked like after our meeting:
What this ultimately turned into is the following (click on the report for a
full-sized version):
Now, let me be clear, this could have gone in lots of different directions,
and in many cases it does depending on the client. We chose the metrics above
for our template because we felt they provided the best high-level insight. Let
me explain.
The KPI's we thought were most important were traffic and goals. That was a
relatively simple one to decide since this is ultimately what clients hire us to
improve.
Leading indicators were a bit more challenging to solidify. We decided that
for the purposes of story-telling, landing page data would be able to explain to
our clients the progress we were making around specific landing pages we were
optimizing. It also would provide more data into which *groups* of keywords were
doing well and which needed a bit more attention. We also put an emphasis on
vertical rankings (we partner with Rank Ranger to get that data). We
specifically did not want to focus on individual keywords, although there is
still a section for specific changes which are chosen to highlight campaign
progress.
The nice to know information is the one section that we didn't trend, and in
the future we still might decide to do that. For now, we highlight user
engagement data like pages per visit, bounce rate and average time on site. The
one area we do trend here is site indexation, because that can have a major
effect on a site's search engine health and provides an early warning to any
index bloat issues
A bonus area we added to the report allows our account managers to think
creatively regarding non-standard data highlights and observations.
Interestingly, this is often the section that gets the most comments from
clients.
The most time-consuming piece in this whole process was setting up the initial
template. The report itself is actually quite simple after that. The
client-facing portion is one tab, which allows us to PDF everything, and it
pulls data from other data tabs.
Most of the tabs have a similar table which has the date and the metric you
want to visualize. This is just copying and pasting numbers from Analytics -
nothing fancy. But, if you're curious, the tables where we put this data look
like this:
Pulling the data
Once set up, the only data we are pulling from Analytics is the number of:
Total organic visits, broken down by the traffic source
Goal conversions (transactions and revenue for e-commerce)
Micro goal conversions (newsletter signups, or event tracking on important
buttons)
Total page views
Bounce rate
Time spent on site
The report basically does the rest since the data sources for all the graphs
and charts have already been selected.
We also download landing page data from Google Analytics which includes two
segments: organic and total traffic compared by current and previous month.
Similarly, when added into the appropriate columns, the template populates the
data into this section:
All this data pulling and automation helps a lot with the time element. The
problem we found was with a 10 person team (let alone a team of significantly
more people), everyone wanted some level of customization, which was completely
understandable. Each client is going to have specific requests, and each account
manager is going to want to tweak it to their liking. The problem with everyone
customizing the template is that it often resulted in some elements displaying
weirdly when we made it into a PDF, or worse, broke some of the formulas that
caused the template to work.
When we investigated this, we found that 80% of our clients could use one of 2
templates:
A conversion and micro conversion report which reported on a goal we had set up
and included events and micro conversions we were targeting
An e-commerce report which reported on transactions and revenue generated from
organic search
Keeping the rest of the report intact involved some creativity. For this, if
you are not familiar with offsets, then I suggest paying close attention.
The offset function creates magic
This is a little-used Excel function from what I have found, but it's super
powerful. What it does is:
"Returns a reference to a range that is a specified number of rows and columns
from a cell or range of cells. The reference that is returned can be a single
cell or a range of cells. You can specify the number of rows and the number of
columns to be returned." Source: Microsoft Excel Help
In other words, one cell could control pivoting the entire report between
months. Every single table that you have in the report can be linked to one cell
and change as that cell changes. Even better, if you can create a button that is
connected to this cell, with the simple click of the button, it can adjust data
in various parts of the template such as the date, the header, footer, and even
provide a way for clients to navigate themselves through the data (if set up
correctly).
Here is how it works for us:
In many ways, this serves as a database that holds historical data so it's
saved for the future. Using this, we can show a trended analysis of the progress
we have made over time without having to do a ton of data pulling, saving us a
significant amount of time.
Given the amount of reports we, as an agency, run on a monthly basis, we need
to find better ways of automation without the restrictions that come with third
party tools. We have started developing an interactive web-based reporting tool
built on the Microsoft Reporting framework. This will work by setting up
scheduled jobs to collect data from various data sources (including Google
Analytics) and automatically store them in our database so that we don't even
have to pull the data. This will allow our team (and in the future - our
clients) to access this data via pre-templated online reports and more time to
tell stories and analyze trends.
For now, we are still using Excel, which our clients still love.
The real point that I want to stress is that no matter what method you use for
reports, the story is key. The data is crucial, but the insight around the data
is what management wants to see. They want to visually see what is happening
with their business, and understand through our analysis why it's happening.
We have received an incredible amount of feedback from clients who have said
things like "I really LOVE the format of having the charts or graphs, and then
having your commentary/insights right next to itâTOTALLY works for me"
So they are happy. We are happy.
And that's our process â I hope you found something you can take away
for your reports as well.
One final tip to build the report
This is not something that could be done alone. It really took the entire
team's effort, ranging from junior associates up to the CEO, getting buy-in,
agreeing on the metrics, and believing in the vision for what we were trying to
accomplish with reporting. The ideas and feedback were invaluable and they
should all be proud of what we accomplished together.
Download the template
To help you get started, we have made the template available for you to
download. I am happy to answer any specific questions in the comments and help
you as you set up your own report for you and your clients.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LC-1vneNKZE/storytelling-through-data-a-new-inbound-marketing-seo-report-structure
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Inbound Marketing & SEO Report Structure'
Posted by ajfriedThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the
main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.
No matter what business you are in, it's a pretty sure thing that someone is
going to want to monitor how efficiently and productively you are working. Being
able to show these results over time is crucial to maintaining the health of the
long-term relationship.
To us, reporting has become much less about the data, and more about the story
you can tell with it. Not to say that data isn't important, but while a big
spike in traffic is awesome, the drop that comes after it might not necessarily
be a bad thing. It could be seasonal. Or maybe it's just leveling back after the
brand was mentioned in a news report. To be totally honest, the same thing could
apply to the spike itself, so hold off on those celebrations!
For the sake of transparency, this is something that we always felt we could
improve on more at Kahena. We have tried it all, from email write ups, to using
straight ranking reports (blerg, I know - so 2007), to a template-based Excel
model (which is what we currently use), and even as far as planning a future
web-based reporting platform for all of our clients to log in to and utilize as
needed.
This whole project really started in the wake of Google blocking all keyword
data and turning it all into [not provided]. This really forced us to break old
and bad habits and redefine what important metrics and insights we were sharing
with clients.
We had two goals in mind during this project which were to:
Automate the report as much as possible so that we have more time to analyze the
data and provide deeper, more valuable insights, both for our clients and our
own internal strategies.
Keep the template intact so there was standardization across our reports.
Categorizing all the data
We held a brainstorm and decided to compartmentalize the data into 3 different
categories:
KPIs: These are the key performance indicators that we felt show bottom line
progress from the campaign.
Leading Indicators: These metrics add value to the story by exhibiting a
correlation with the KPIs. These are all things that clients need to know to
understand the KPI outcomes.
Nice to know: These metrics don't necessarily make or break the campaign, but
are notable and worth mentioning because they provide some insight into overall
performance.
Here's what the brainstorm looked like after our meeting:
What this ultimately turned into is the following (click on the report for a
full-sized version):
Now, let me be clear, this could have gone in lots of different directions,
and in many cases it does depending on the client. We chose the metrics above
for our template because we felt they provided the best high-level insight. Let
me explain.
The KPI's we thought were most important were traffic and goals. That was a
relatively simple one to decide since this is ultimately what clients hire us to
improve.
Leading indicators were a bit more challenging to solidify. We decided that
for the purposes of story-telling, landing page data would be able to explain to
our clients the progress we were making around specific landing pages we were
optimizing. It also would provide more data into which *groups* of keywords were
doing well and which needed a bit more attention. We also put an emphasis on
vertical rankings (we partner with Rank Ranger to get that data). We
specifically did not want to focus on individual keywords, although there is
still a section for specific changes which are chosen to highlight campaign
progress.
The nice to know information is the one section that we didn't trend, and in
the future we still might decide to do that. For now, we highlight user
engagement data like pages per visit, bounce rate and average time on site. The
one area we do trend here is site indexation, because that can have a major
effect on a site's search engine health and provides an early warning to any
index bloat issues
A bonus area we added to the report allows our account managers to think
creatively regarding non-standard data highlights and observations.
Interestingly, this is often the section that gets the most comments from
clients.
The most time-consuming piece in this whole process was setting up the initial
template. The report itself is actually quite simple after that. The
client-facing portion is one tab, which allows us to PDF everything, and it
pulls data from other data tabs.
Most of the tabs have a similar table which has the date and the metric you
want to visualize. This is just copying and pasting numbers from Analytics -
nothing fancy. But, if you're curious, the tables where we put this data look
like this:
Pulling the data
Once set up, the only data we are pulling from Analytics is the number of:
Total organic visits, broken down by the traffic source
Goal conversions (transactions and revenue for e-commerce)
Micro goal conversions (newsletter signups, or event tracking on important
buttons)
Total page views
Bounce rate
Time spent on site
The report basically does the rest since the data sources for all the graphs
and charts have already been selected.
We also download landing page data from Google Analytics which includes two
segments: organic and total traffic compared by current and previous month.
Similarly, when added into the appropriate columns, the template populates the
data into this section:
All this data pulling and automation helps a lot with the time element. The
problem we found was with a 10 person team (let alone a team of significantly
more people), everyone wanted some level of customization, which was completely
understandable. Each client is going to have specific requests, and each account
manager is going to want to tweak it to their liking. The problem with everyone
customizing the template is that it often resulted in some elements displaying
weirdly when we made it into a PDF, or worse, broke some of the formulas that
caused the template to work.
When we investigated this, we found that 80% of our clients could use one of 2
templates:
A conversion and micro conversion report which reported on a goal we had set up
and included events and micro conversions we were targeting
An e-commerce report which reported on transactions and revenue generated from
organic search
Keeping the rest of the report intact involved some creativity. For this, if
you are not familiar with offsets, then I suggest paying close attention.
The offset function creates magic
This is a little-used Excel function from what I have found, but it's super
powerful. What it does is:
"Returns a reference to a range that is a specified number of rows and columns
from a cell or range of cells. The reference that is returned can be a single
cell or a range of cells. You can specify the number of rows and the number of
columns to be returned." Source: Microsoft Excel Help
In other words, one cell could control pivoting the entire report between
months. Every single table that you have in the report can be linked to one cell
and change as that cell changes. Even better, if you can create a button that is
connected to this cell, with the simple click of the button, it can adjust data
in various parts of the template such as the date, the header, footer, and even
provide a way for clients to navigate themselves through the data (if set up
correctly).
Here is how it works for us:
In many ways, this serves as a database that holds historical data so it's
saved for the future. Using this, we can show a trended analysis of the progress
we have made over time without having to do a ton of data pulling, saving us a
significant amount of time.
Given the amount of reports we, as an agency, run on a monthly basis, we need
to find better ways of automation without the restrictions that come with third
party tools. We have started developing an interactive web-based reporting tool
built on the Microsoft Reporting framework. This will work by setting up
scheduled jobs to collect data from various data sources (including Google
Analytics) and automatically store them in our database so that we don't even
have to pull the data. This will allow our team (and in the future - our
clients) to access this data via pre-templated online reports and more time to
tell stories and analyze trends.
For now, we are still using Excel, which our clients still love.
The real point that I want to stress is that no matter what method you use for
reports, the story is key. The data is crucial, but the insight around the data
is what management wants to see. They want to visually see what is happening
with their business, and understand through our analysis why it's happening.
We have received an incredible amount of feedback from clients who have said
things like "I really LOVE the format of having the charts or graphs, and then
having your commentary/insights right next to itâTOTALLY works for me"
So they are happy. We are happy.
And that's our process â I hope you found something you can take away
for your reports as well.
One final tip to build the report
This is not something that could be done alone. It really took the entire
team's effort, ranging from junior associates up to the CEO, getting buy-in,
agreeing on the metrics, and believing in the vision for what we were trying to
accomplish with reporting. The ideas and feedback were invaluable and they
should all be proud of what we accomplished together.
Download the template
To help you get started, we have made the template available for you to
download. I am happy to answer any specific questions in the comments and help
you as you set up your own report for you and your clients.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LC-1vneNKZE/storytelling-through-data-a-new-inbound-marketing-seo-report-structure
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday, 7 January 2014
[Build Backlinks Online] Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer's Guide to Smart Keyword Research
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy
Web Marketer's Guide to Smart Keyword Research'
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
The SEO's system for themed keyword research.
If Google's Penguin update and Knowledge Graph have taught us anything, it's
that concepts have become more important than individual keywords for search
marketing.
Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds
keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every search begins with keywords. Over 5 billion Google searches a day.
Consider the following:
Google's entire business is based on selling keywords â over 40 billion
dollars a year, most of it from keyword sales through advertising.
(not provided) affects only post-click analytics. It doesn't influence the
pre-click keywords users type into search boxes.
Keywords and their meaning remain the primary input search engines use to
deliver answers to users (while other inputs such as location data and app
integration are on the rise).
Marketers who invest in smart keyword research will continue to have a huge
advantage over the competition.
The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.
From single keywords to themed concepts
When most of us first learned SEO, we learned to research one keyword at a
time. We optimized our page for that keyword by placing it in the title tag, in
the headline, a few times in the body, and maybe the alt text of a photo.
If we were really fancy we'd optimize a page for two keywords. Oh dear.
In truth, optimizing pages with a single keyword mentality hasn't worked
well for a long time.
Content today has to be about something.
The difference today from years past is the shift from individual keywords
to concepts. Concepts relate to search marketing in three primary ways:
1. What the user intends
Search engines try to better understand what the user asks by relating that
question to concepts. If I search for "movie about tiger on boat" Google will
likely understand that I am asking about the movie Life of Pi, not about pages
optimized for those specific keywords.
2. What your content is about
Search engines read the keywords on your pages to try and figure out what
those pages are conceptually about.
3. Relating concepts to one another
The Knowledge Graph shows us how Google relates concepts to each other. In
the case of Life of Pi, this may be showing how the film relates to ratings,
reviews, actors, writers, and the cast.
Keyword targeting: the dumb, hard way
In the post How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint, I first addressed the
concept of themed keyword research. The guide lists the biggest mistakes people
make when choosing keywords. Here's what we want to avoid:
Choosing keywords that are too broad
Keywords with too much competition
Keywords without enough trafficâ¨
Keywords that don't convert
Trying to rank for one keyword at a time
Instead, let's take the opposite approach.
The basic idea is that we're going to focus our content around ideas instead
of keywords, and thus give us the potential to rank for 100s or 1000s of
keywords at a time.
The smart system of themed keyword research
Let's explore a new way of thinking about keywords. It requires discarding
some of our old ideas and taking advantage of how Google may likely decide what
our content is about.
To accomplish this, we'll leverage some obvious truths about search traffic.
Truth #1: Over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from
keywords you didn't try to optimize for.
If you've ever seen a keyword report in your analytics platform or Google
Webmaster Tools, you know this is true.
What are these keywords? They may be synonyms, thematically related, or
closely related ideas that search engines thought best matched your content.
Sometimes they are way off base, but we won't concern ourselves with those.
With this in mind, optimizing for a only a single keyword means ignoring the
majority of your potential traffic.
Truth #2: Ranking number one is not a requirement for earning thousands of
visits.
Given what we know about point #1, it's often better to rank in position 2
or lower for hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords than it is to rank
number one for a single keyword.
Truth #3: The best keyword tools in the world will only show you a fraction
of the keywords you can potentially rank for.
Have you ever compared your long tail keyword data with data from Google's
own Keyword Planner?
Most of those keywords will show little potential search traffic or won't
even register, but you know this isn't true because these are the same keywords
that brought you traffic.
Relying on keyword research tools alone wont bring you to your full ranking
potential. You need content that fully explores your themed concepts.
Truth #4: Search engines sell keywords grouped into concepts and themes.
We can learn from this strategy.
When you purchase keywords through AdWords, Google suggests keywords to you
in tightly grouped themes and ideas. In fact, they do everything they can to
discourage you from bidding on individual keywords.
Of course, this is one way for Google to make more money, but it's also
because Google knows that concepts are often a better indicator of searcher
intent than individual keywords.
Part of this is due to the fact that 15% of all Google searches, or over
half a billion per day, have never been seen by before.
Now let's put these ideas into action.
Step 1: Gather your keyword seeds
Folks talk about different processes of keyword research depending on
whether you are going after
Traffic: good for pure pageviews and ad-based revenue sites, or
Conversions: for example, when you sell goods or services or need brand
awareness
Most of the time, you already have a good idea of what your keyword topic
broadly covers, especially if you're working with an established business or
website.
For our purposes, let's explore ideas around the keyword "seo tools" â
a term near and dear to our hearts here at Moz. In reality, this is an extremely
competitive keyword, and for your own research you'd likely want to begin with a
longer-tail, less competitive term.
Brainstorming
There are literally hundreds of keyword research tools out there to
experiment with, but a few SEO favorites include:
bersuggest
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Bing Keyword Tool
Keyword Spy
Wordstream
Google Display Planner
SEO Book keyword tools
Google Trends
Soovle
SEMrush
In the end, you will likely rely heavily on Google AdWords Keyword Planner,
but you never want to rely on it as your sole tool. It's best to explore and
play around with many tools to discover new ideas.
Here are keyword suggestions from Grepwords.
There are no rules except to have fun and try to discover new keywords you
haven't considered before.
Step 2: Get specific with modifiers
This is basic stuff, but it bears emphasizing: The more specific your
keywords, the easier it typically is to rank for those keywords.
Sure, it would be great to rank for the keyword "SEO tools" itself, but most
people aren't searching that way. Instead, they are likely looking for something
more specific.
Common keyword modifiers include:
Time and Date: "SEO Tools 2014"
Quality and/or Price: "Free SEO Tools", "Fastest SEO Tools"
Intent: "Buy SEO Tools", "Find SEO Tools"
Location: "SEO Tools Online", "Canadian SEO Tools"
Your chosen keyword research tools will uncover these and many more
qualifiers, but you'll want to include them in your searches as well.
Case Study: the $70,000 keyword modifier
Seasonal keywords are often super-effective. I discovered this myself a few
years ago as an independent SEO with the keyword "IRA contribution limits." The
keyword had good volume but was super-competitive, so I knew I was never going
to rank for it.
Using Google Trends, I found that usage for this keyword spiked at certain
times of the year, and that in fact people were looking for information for a
specific year, i.e. "IRA contribution limits 2012."
Using Google Trends is a great way to validate any keyword idea, as it will
often reveal hidden patterns and insight not present in other tools.
Armed with the new knowledge, I found many more date-specific keywords
themed around this topic and built an entire domain around them. Although it
took a lot of hard work, the site eventually drew tons of seasonal traffic and I
was able to sell the site with a significant profit.
It's a good idea to validate all your important keyword ideas through Google
Trends, as it will often reveal patterns and insights not present in other
keyword research tools.
Step 3: Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner
For small and medium-sized research jobs, nothing beats going directly to
Google's AdWords Keyword Tool for relevant suggestions and search volume. (For
larger and enterprise-type projects, see the alternatives at the end of the
post.)
This is basic stuff, but you'll want to search for New Keyword and Adgroup
Ideas and head straight to the to the Keyword Ideas tab. For a more complete
guide to using the planner, Kristi Hines wrote a great guide here.
Hint: While most seasoned SEOs skip over the Ad Groups tab, there's a wealth
of ideas there tightly grouped into themed keywords â exactly what we are
looking for!
Traditionally, marketers use Google's keyword tool because of search volume
and competition scores, but most web marketers underplay one of the most
powerful features of this tool: the ability to sort keyword suggestions by
relevance.
This gives us a huge advantage in creating themed keyword lists, and helps
us create more targeted content.
Because the top suggestions often contain your core keywords, it's helpful
to use negative keywords to discover more variation.
Step 4: Defining the concepts further
Now that you have your basic keyword idea, the next step is creating your
keyword theme by finding keywords that are conceptually related.
There are several ways to do this. For our example of "SEO tools" let's try
the popular methods to build out our themed list.
Google's Related Searches
At the bottom of most Google results is a section called Related Searches.
This is a gold mine of conceptually related concepts.
By clicking through the results and then examining those related searches
(and repeating this process over and over) you can quickly find many long-tail
opportunities much easier than using Google's AdWords Keyword Planner.
Google Trends
At the bottom of each trends report is a "Related Searches" section that can
be used to discover conceptually related queries.
Wikistalker
This cool tool introduced to me by Peter Bray "illustrates the relations
between different things by visualizing the semantic relevance between the
inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia entry articles."
So if we search Wikistalker for "Search Engine Optimization" it shows us the
following Wikipedia articles with the highest semantic relevance.
Internet Marketing: 85% relevant
Google Webmaster Tools: 70% relevant
Marketing: 59% relevant
Other tools
In fact, many other keyword research tools like Deeperweb Search, SEMRush,
YouTube Analytics or WordStream can help you discover related keyword phrases.
Step 5: Empathy, your secret keyword weapon
Ask yourself what a visitor wants to find on this page.
As Rand explains in this excellent Whiteboard Friday, putting yourself in
the visitor's shoes and anticipating their needs provides a wealth of
conceptually related keyword ideas.
Searchers of "SEO tools" are usually asking a number of similar questions:
How much does it cost? Free, plans and pricing, free trial
What kinds of tools are there? Link building, crawling, and indexing
Who are the tools for? Agency software, small business
How good are the tools? Best, endorsed by, customer review
By answering as many searcher questions as we can, we continue to build our
themed keyword concept.
Step 6: Can you rank? Getting strategic with competition
In this case, it's much better to go straight to the search engine results
page (SERP). This was covered in How to Rank, so let me plagiarize myself by
repeating the important points here.
You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:
Automated tools like Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool
Eyeballing the SERPs
If you have a paid subscription to Moz, or even a free trial, the Keyword
Difficulty Tool calculates â on a 100-point scale â a difficulty
score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.
If you run a full report you can break down the SERP for each keyword and
judge the individual strengths of each URL that ranks. You can even add your own
URL to see how you stack up.
Keyword phrases in the 60-100 range are typically very competitive, while
keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.
Manual method: the eyeball check
Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to
simply look at the top results currently ranking.
Run a non-personalized search query for your keywords. Examine the top few
results and ask yourself the following questions (SEO toolbars like the MozBar
or SEOquake can help speed up the process):
Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
What's the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
What's the inbound anchor text?
Can you build links and/or mentions around this keyword?
Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword than the top
ranking sites?
The last question is the most important: can you deliver higher quality
content for this keyword than the competition?
The answer must be yes if you expect to deserve to rank.
Step 7: Pulling it all together
By this point, you've probably analyzed hundreds or thousands of keywords
and organized them into themed, related groups.
You've found keywords that relate to your business or website, around which
you can create shareable content, with a high enough search volume, and that you
believe you can rank for.
Often, the keywords that you choose depend as much on your business or
website as they do on the competition. We chose the keywords above not only
because they relate to our primary keyword, but also because they relate to our
business. Google may rank keywords based on relevance, but only you can decide
if those keywords relate to your audience, product, and brand.
In the case of our "SEO Tools" example, our themed keyword list might look
like this.
Free SEO Tools
Best SEO Software
Keyword Research
Search Engine Optimization
Link Building Toolset
Best SEO Tools in 2013
Online Marketing
SEO for Google
Best SEO Tools for Agencies
Remember, we started with a very broad keyword. In practice, your final
keyword will be much more tightly focused.
We'll now use this list for creating content around our keyword theme. In a
future post, we'll discuss integrating these concepts for optimal on-page SEO.
Tips for scaling and large sites
The above method works if you're building out keyword lists for small to
medium sites, but scaling this process for large and enterprise sites requires a
different, more mathematical approach.
If you want to research tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of
keywords at a time, I highly recommend the looking into the following resources:
Grepwords â Keyword Suggestion API with search volume
SEOGadget for Excel â Link Research and Keyword Data. Integrates with
Grepwords and SEMRush
How to do Keyword Research for SEO â Written by Nick Eubanks, this $37
guide is well worth the money and offers a number of tips and tricks.
Conclusion
The above method is only one method of keyword research. There are hundreds
more and you'll likely invent your own method.
Regardless of the method you use, thinking about keywords in terms of
concepts and themes represents a hugely important step in content development.
What are your favorite keyword tips to organize content around concepts?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/jBR69uO8YoA/keywords-to-concepts
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Web Marketer's Guide to Smart Keyword Research'
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
The SEO's system for themed keyword research.
If Google's Penguin update and Knowledge Graph have taught us anything, it's
that concepts have become more important than individual keywords for search
marketing.
Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds
keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every search begins with keywords. Over 5 billion Google searches a day.
Consider the following:
Google's entire business is based on selling keywords â over 40 billion
dollars a year, most of it from keyword sales through advertising.
(not provided) affects only post-click analytics. It doesn't influence the
pre-click keywords users type into search boxes.
Keywords and their meaning remain the primary input search engines use to
deliver answers to users (while other inputs such as location data and app
integration are on the rise).
Marketers who invest in smart keyword research will continue to have a huge
advantage over the competition.
The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.
From single keywords to themed concepts
When most of us first learned SEO, we learned to research one keyword at a
time. We optimized our page for that keyword by placing it in the title tag, in
the headline, a few times in the body, and maybe the alt text of a photo.
If we were really fancy we'd optimize a page for two keywords. Oh dear.
In truth, optimizing pages with a single keyword mentality hasn't worked
well for a long time.
Content today has to be about something.
The difference today from years past is the shift from individual keywords
to concepts. Concepts relate to search marketing in three primary ways:
1. What the user intends
Search engines try to better understand what the user asks by relating that
question to concepts. If I search for "movie about tiger on boat" Google will
likely understand that I am asking about the movie Life of Pi, not about pages
optimized for those specific keywords.
2. What your content is about
Search engines read the keywords on your pages to try and figure out what
those pages are conceptually about.
3. Relating concepts to one another
The Knowledge Graph shows us how Google relates concepts to each other. In
the case of Life of Pi, this may be showing how the film relates to ratings,
reviews, actors, writers, and the cast.
Keyword targeting: the dumb, hard way
In the post How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint, I first addressed the
concept of themed keyword research. The guide lists the biggest mistakes people
make when choosing keywords. Here's what we want to avoid:
Choosing keywords that are too broad
Keywords with too much competition
Keywords without enough trafficâ¨
Keywords that don't convert
Trying to rank for one keyword at a time
Instead, let's take the opposite approach.
The basic idea is that we're going to focus our content around ideas instead
of keywords, and thus give us the potential to rank for 100s or 1000s of
keywords at a time.
The smart system of themed keyword research
Let's explore a new way of thinking about keywords. It requires discarding
some of our old ideas and taking advantage of how Google may likely decide what
our content is about.
To accomplish this, we'll leverage some obvious truths about search traffic.
Truth #1: Over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from
keywords you didn't try to optimize for.
If you've ever seen a keyword report in your analytics platform or Google
Webmaster Tools, you know this is true.
What are these keywords? They may be synonyms, thematically related, or
closely related ideas that search engines thought best matched your content.
Sometimes they are way off base, but we won't concern ourselves with those.
With this in mind, optimizing for a only a single keyword means ignoring the
majority of your potential traffic.
Truth #2: Ranking number one is not a requirement for earning thousands of
visits.
Given what we know about point #1, it's often better to rank in position 2
or lower for hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords than it is to rank
number one for a single keyword.
Truth #3: The best keyword tools in the world will only show you a fraction
of the keywords you can potentially rank for.
Have you ever compared your long tail keyword data with data from Google's
own Keyword Planner?
Most of those keywords will show little potential search traffic or won't
even register, but you know this isn't true because these are the same keywords
that brought you traffic.
Relying on keyword research tools alone wont bring you to your full ranking
potential. You need content that fully explores your themed concepts.
Truth #4: Search engines sell keywords grouped into concepts and themes.
We can learn from this strategy.
When you purchase keywords through AdWords, Google suggests keywords to you
in tightly grouped themes and ideas. In fact, they do everything they can to
discourage you from bidding on individual keywords.
Of course, this is one way for Google to make more money, but it's also
because Google knows that concepts are often a better indicator of searcher
intent than individual keywords.
Part of this is due to the fact that 15% of all Google searches, or over
half a billion per day, have never been seen by before.
Now let's put these ideas into action.
Step 1: Gather your keyword seeds
Folks talk about different processes of keyword research depending on
whether you are going after
Traffic: good for pure pageviews and ad-based revenue sites, or
Conversions: for example, when you sell goods or services or need brand
awareness
Most of the time, you already have a good idea of what your keyword topic
broadly covers, especially if you're working with an established business or
website.
For our purposes, let's explore ideas around the keyword "seo tools" â
a term near and dear to our hearts here at Moz. In reality, this is an extremely
competitive keyword, and for your own research you'd likely want to begin with a
longer-tail, less competitive term.
Brainstorming
There are literally hundreds of keyword research tools out there to
experiment with, but a few SEO favorites include:
bersuggest
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Bing Keyword Tool
Keyword Spy
Wordstream
Google Display Planner
SEO Book keyword tools
Google Trends
Soovle
SEMrush
In the end, you will likely rely heavily on Google AdWords Keyword Planner,
but you never want to rely on it as your sole tool. It's best to explore and
play around with many tools to discover new ideas.
Here are keyword suggestions from Grepwords.
There are no rules except to have fun and try to discover new keywords you
haven't considered before.
Step 2: Get specific with modifiers
This is basic stuff, but it bears emphasizing: The more specific your
keywords, the easier it typically is to rank for those keywords.
Sure, it would be great to rank for the keyword "SEO tools" itself, but most
people aren't searching that way. Instead, they are likely looking for something
more specific.
Common keyword modifiers include:
Time and Date: "SEO Tools 2014"
Quality and/or Price: "Free SEO Tools", "Fastest SEO Tools"
Intent: "Buy SEO Tools", "Find SEO Tools"
Location: "SEO Tools Online", "Canadian SEO Tools"
Your chosen keyword research tools will uncover these and many more
qualifiers, but you'll want to include them in your searches as well.
Case Study: the $70,000 keyword modifier
Seasonal keywords are often super-effective. I discovered this myself a few
years ago as an independent SEO with the keyword "IRA contribution limits." The
keyword had good volume but was super-competitive, so I knew I was never going
to rank for it.
Using Google Trends, I found that usage for this keyword spiked at certain
times of the year, and that in fact people were looking for information for a
specific year, i.e. "IRA contribution limits 2012."
Using Google Trends is a great way to validate any keyword idea, as it will
often reveal hidden patterns and insight not present in other tools.
Armed with the new knowledge, I found many more date-specific keywords
themed around this topic and built an entire domain around them. Although it
took a lot of hard work, the site eventually drew tons of seasonal traffic and I
was able to sell the site with a significant profit.
It's a good idea to validate all your important keyword ideas through Google
Trends, as it will often reveal patterns and insights not present in other
keyword research tools.
Step 3: Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner
For small and medium-sized research jobs, nothing beats going directly to
Google's AdWords Keyword Tool for relevant suggestions and search volume. (For
larger and enterprise-type projects, see the alternatives at the end of the
post.)
This is basic stuff, but you'll want to search for New Keyword and Adgroup
Ideas and head straight to the to the Keyword Ideas tab. For a more complete
guide to using the planner, Kristi Hines wrote a great guide here.
Hint: While most seasoned SEOs skip over the Ad Groups tab, there's a wealth
of ideas there tightly grouped into themed keywords â exactly what we are
looking for!
Traditionally, marketers use Google's keyword tool because of search volume
and competition scores, but most web marketers underplay one of the most
powerful features of this tool: the ability to sort keyword suggestions by
relevance.
This gives us a huge advantage in creating themed keyword lists, and helps
us create more targeted content.
Because the top suggestions often contain your core keywords, it's helpful
to use negative keywords to discover more variation.
Step 4: Defining the concepts further
Now that you have your basic keyword idea, the next step is creating your
keyword theme by finding keywords that are conceptually related.
There are several ways to do this. For our example of "SEO tools" let's try
the popular methods to build out our themed list.
Google's Related Searches
At the bottom of most Google results is a section called Related Searches.
This is a gold mine of conceptually related concepts.
By clicking through the results and then examining those related searches
(and repeating this process over and over) you can quickly find many long-tail
opportunities much easier than using Google's AdWords Keyword Planner.
Google Trends
At the bottom of each trends report is a "Related Searches" section that can
be used to discover conceptually related queries.
Wikistalker
This cool tool introduced to me by Peter Bray "illustrates the relations
between different things by visualizing the semantic relevance between the
inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia entry articles."
So if we search Wikistalker for "Search Engine Optimization" it shows us the
following Wikipedia articles with the highest semantic relevance.
Internet Marketing: 85% relevant
Google Webmaster Tools: 70% relevant
Marketing: 59% relevant
Other tools
In fact, many other keyword research tools like Deeperweb Search, SEMRush,
YouTube Analytics or WordStream can help you discover related keyword phrases.
Step 5: Empathy, your secret keyword weapon
Ask yourself what a visitor wants to find on this page.
As Rand explains in this excellent Whiteboard Friday, putting yourself in
the visitor's shoes and anticipating their needs provides a wealth of
conceptually related keyword ideas.
Searchers of "SEO tools" are usually asking a number of similar questions:
How much does it cost? Free, plans and pricing, free trial
What kinds of tools are there? Link building, crawling, and indexing
Who are the tools for? Agency software, small business
How good are the tools? Best, endorsed by, customer review
By answering as many searcher questions as we can, we continue to build our
themed keyword concept.
Step 6: Can you rank? Getting strategic with competition
In this case, it's much better to go straight to the search engine results
page (SERP). This was covered in How to Rank, so let me plagiarize myself by
repeating the important points here.
You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:
Automated tools like Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool
Eyeballing the SERPs
If you have a paid subscription to Moz, or even a free trial, the Keyword
Difficulty Tool calculates â on a 100-point scale â a difficulty
score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.
If you run a full report you can break down the SERP for each keyword and
judge the individual strengths of each URL that ranks. You can even add your own
URL to see how you stack up.
Keyword phrases in the 60-100 range are typically very competitive, while
keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.
Manual method: the eyeball check
Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to
simply look at the top results currently ranking.
Run a non-personalized search query for your keywords. Examine the top few
results and ask yourself the following questions (SEO toolbars like the MozBar
or SEOquake can help speed up the process):
Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
What's the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
What's the inbound anchor text?
Can you build links and/or mentions around this keyword?
Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword than the top
ranking sites?
The last question is the most important: can you deliver higher quality
content for this keyword than the competition?
The answer must be yes if you expect to deserve to rank.
Step 7: Pulling it all together
By this point, you've probably analyzed hundreds or thousands of keywords
and organized them into themed, related groups.
You've found keywords that relate to your business or website, around which
you can create shareable content, with a high enough search volume, and that you
believe you can rank for.
Often, the keywords that you choose depend as much on your business or
website as they do on the competition. We chose the keywords above not only
because they relate to our primary keyword, but also because they relate to our
business. Google may rank keywords based on relevance, but only you can decide
if those keywords relate to your audience, product, and brand.
In the case of our "SEO Tools" example, our themed keyword list might look
like this.
Free SEO Tools
Best SEO Software
Keyword Research
Search Engine Optimization
Link Building Toolset
Best SEO Tools in 2013
Online Marketing
SEO for Google
Best SEO Tools for Agencies
Remember, we started with a very broad keyword. In practice, your final
keyword will be much more tightly focused.
We'll now use this list for creating content around our keyword theme. In a
future post, we'll discuss integrating these concepts for optimal on-page SEO.
Tips for scaling and large sites
The above method works if you're building out keyword lists for small to
medium sites, but scaling this process for large and enterprise sites requires a
different, more mathematical approach.
If you want to research tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of
keywords at a time, I highly recommend the looking into the following resources:
Grepwords â Keyword Suggestion API with search volume
SEOGadget for Excel â Link Research and Keyword Data. Integrates with
Grepwords and SEMRush
How to do Keyword Research for SEO â Written by Nick Eubanks, this $37
guide is well worth the money and offers a number of tips and tricks.
Conclusion
The above method is only one method of keyword research. There are hundreds
more and you'll likely invent your own method.
Regardless of the method you use, thinking about keywords in terms of
concepts and themes represents a hugely important step in content development.
What are your favorite keyword tips to organize content around concepts?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/jBR69uO8YoA/keywords-to-concepts
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] The Lazy Web Marketer's Guide for Smart Keyword Research
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Lazy Web Marketer's Guide for
Smart Keyword Research'
Posted by Cyrus-ShepardFrom keywords to concepts: the smart SEO's system for how
to do themed keyword research
If Google's Penguin update and Knowledge Graph have taught us anything, it's
that concepts have become more important than individual keywords for search
marketing.
Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds
keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every search begins with keywords. Over 5 billion Google searches a day.
Consider the following:
Google's entire business is based on selling keywords â over 40 billion
dollars a year, most of it from keyword sales through advertising.
(not provided) affects only post-click analytics. It doesn't influence the
pre-click keywords users type into search boxes.
Keywords and their meaning remain the primary input search engines use to
deliver answers to users (while other inputs such as location data and app
integration are on the rise).
Marketers who invest in smart keyword research will continue to have a huge
advantage over the competition.
The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.
From single keywords to themed concepts
When most of us first learned SEO, we learned to research one keyword at a
time. We optimized our page for that keyword by placing it in the title tag, in
the headline, a few times in the body, and maybe the alt text of a photo.
If we were really fancy we'd optimize a page for two keywords. Oh dear.
In truth, optimizing pages with a single keyword mentality hasn't worked
well for a long time.
Content today has to be about something.
The difference today from years past is the shift from individual keywords
to concepts. Concepts relate to search marketing in three primary ways:
1. What the user intends
Search engines try to better understand what the user asks by relating that
question to concepts. If I search for "movie about tiger on boat" Google will
likely understand that I am asking about the movie Life of Pi, not about pages
optimized for those specific keywords.
2. What your content is about
Search engines read the keywords on your pages to try and figure out what
those pages are conceptually about.
3. Relating concepts to one another
The Knowledge Graph shows us how Google relates concepts to each other. In
the case of Life of Pi, this may be showing how the film relates to ratings,
reviews, actors, writers, and the cast.
Keyword targeting: the dumb, hard way
In the post How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint, I first addressed the
concept of themed keyword research. The guide lists the biggest mistakes people
make when choosing keywords. Here's what we want to avoid:
Choosing keywords that are too broad
Keywords with too much competition
Keywords without enough trafficâ¨
Keywords that don't convert
Trying to rank for one keyword at a time
Instead, let's take the opposite approach.
The basic idea is that we're going to focus our content around ideas instead
of keywords, and thus give us the potential to rank for 100s or 1000s of
keywords at a time.
The smart system of themed keyword research
Let's explore a new way of thinking about keywords. It requires discarding
some of our old ideas and taking advantage of how Google may likely decide what
our content is about.
To accomplish this, we'll leverage some obvious truths about search traffic.
Truth #1: Over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from
keywords you didn't try to optimize for.
If you've ever seen a keyword report in your analytics platform or Google
Webmaster Tools, you know this is true.
What are these keywords? They may be synonyms, thematically related, or
closely related ideas that search engines thought best matched your content.
Sometimes they are way off base, but we won't concern ourselves with those.
With this in mind, optimizing for a only a single keyword means ignoring the
majority of your potential traffic.
Truth #2: Ranking number one is not a requirement for earning thousands of
visits.
Given what we know about point #1, it's often better to rank in position 2
or lower for hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords than it is to rank
number one for a single keyword.
Truth #3: The best keyword tools in the world will only show you a fraction
of the keywords you can potentially rank for.
Have you ever compared your long tail keyword data with data from Google's
own Keyword Planner?
Most of those keywords will show little potential search traffic or won't
even register, but you know this isn't true because these are the same keywords
that brought you traffic.
Relying on keyword research tools alone wont bring you to your full ranking
potential. You need content that fully explores your themed concepts.
Truth #4: Search engines sell keywords grouped into concepts and themes.
We can learn from this strategy.
When you purchase keywords through AdWords, Google suggests keywords to you
in tightly grouped themes and ideas. In fact, they do everything they can to
discourage you from bidding on individual keywords.
Of course, this is one way for Google to make more money, but it's also
because Google knows that concepts are often a better indicator of searcher
intent than individual keywords.
Part of this is due to the fact that 15% of all Google searches, or over
half a billion per day, have never been seen by before.
Now let's put these ideas into action.
Step 1: Gather your keyword seeds
Folks talk about different processes of keyword research depending on
whether you are going after
Traffic: good for pure pageviews and ad-based revenue sites, or
Conversions: for example, when you sell goods or services or need brand
awareness
Most of the time, you already have a good idea of what your keyword topic
broadly covers, especially if you're working with an established business or
website.
For our purposes, let's explore ideas around the keyword "seo tools" â
a term near and dear to our hearts here at Moz. In reality, this is an extremely
competitive keyword, and for your own research you'd likely want to begin with a
longer-tail, less competitive term.
Brainstorming
There are literally hundreds of keyword research tools out there to
experiment with, but a few SEO favorites include:
bersuggest
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Bing Keyword Tool
Keyword Spy
Wordstream
Google Display Planner
SEO Book keyword tools
Google Trends
Soovle
SEMrush
In the end, you will likely rely heavily on Google AdWords Keyword Planner,
but you never want to rely on it as your sole tool. It's best to explore and
play around with many tools to discover new ideas.
Here are keyword suggestions from Grepwords.
There are no rules except to have fun and try to discover new keywords you
haven't considered before.
Step 2: Get specific with modifiers
This is basic stuff, but it bears emphasizing: The more specific your
keywords, the easier it typically is to rank for those keywords.
Sure, it would be great to rank for the keyword "SEO tools" itself, but most
people aren't searching that way. Instead, they are likely looking for something
more specific.
Common keyword modifiers include:
Time and Date: "SEO Tools 2014"
Quality and/or Price: "Free SEO Tools", "Fastest SEO Tools"
Intent: "Buy SEO Tools", "Find SEO Tools"
Location: "SEO Tools Online", "Canadian SEO Tools"
Your chosen keyword research tools will uncover these and many more
qualifiers, but you'll want to include them in your searches as well.
Case Study: the $70,000 keyword modifier
Seasonal keywords are often super-effective. I discovered this myself a few
years ago as an independent SEO with the keyword "IRA contribution limits." The
keyword had good volume but was super-competitive, so I knew I was never going
to rank for it.
Using Google Trends, I found that usage for this keyword spiked at certain
times of the year, and that in fact people were looking for information for a
specific year, i.e. "IRA contribution limits 2012."
Using Google Trends is a great way to validate any keyword idea, as it will
often reveal hidden patterns and insight not present in other tools.
Armed with the new knowledge, I found many more date-specific keywords
themed around this topic and built an entire domain around them. Although it
took a lot of hard work, the site eventually drew tons of seasonal traffic and I
was able to sell the site with a significant profit.
It's a good idea to validate all your important keyword ideas through Google
Trends, as it will often reveal patterns and insights not present in other
keyword research tools.
Step 3: Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner
For small and medium-sized research jobs, nothing beats going directly to
Google's AdWords Keyword Tool for relevant suggestions and search volume. (For
larger and enterprise-type projects, see the alternatives at the end of the
post.)
This is basic stuff, but you'll want to search for New Keyword and Adgroup
Ideas and head straight to the to the Keyword Ideas tab. For a more complete
guide to using the planner, Kristi Hines wrote a great guide here.
Hint: While most seasoned SEOs skip over the Ad Groups tab, there's a
wealth of ideas there tightly grouped into themed keywords â exactly what
we are looking for!
Traditionally, marketers use Google's keyword tool because of search volume
and competition scores, but most web marketers underplay one of the most
powerful features of this tool: the ability to sort keyword suggestions by
relevance.
This gives us a huge advantage in creating themed keyword lists, and helps
us create more targeted content.
Because the top suggestions often contain your core keywords, it's helpful
to use negative keywords to discover more variation.
Step 4: Defining the concepts further
Now that you have your basic keyword idea, the next step is creating your
keyword theme by finding keywords that are conceptually related.
There are several ways to do this. For our example of "SEO tools" let's try
the popular methods to build out our themed list.
Google's Related Searches
At the bottom of most Google results is a section called Related Searches.
This is a gold mine of conceptually related concepts.
By clicking through the results and then examining those related searches
(and repeating this process over and over) you can quickly find many long-tail
opportunities much easier than using Google's AdWords Keyword Planner.
Google Trends
At the bottom of each trends report is a "Related Searches" section that can
be used to discover conceptually related queries.
Wikistalker
This cool tool introduced to me by Peter Bray "illustrates the relations
between different things by visualizing the semantic relevance between the
inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia entry articles."
So if we search Wikistalker for "Search Engine Optimization" it shows us the
following Wikipedia articles with the highest semantic relevance.
Internet Marketing: 85% relevant
Google Webmaster Tools: 70% relevant
Marketing: 59% relevant
Other tools
In fact, many other keyword research tools like Deeperweb Search, SEMRush,
YouTube Analytics or WordStream can help you discover related keyword phrases.
Step 5: Empathy, your secret keyword weapon
Ask yourself what a visitor wants to find on this page.
As Rand explains in this excellent Whiteboard Friday, putting yourself in
the visitor's shoes and anticipating their needs provides a wealth of
conceptually related keyword ideas.
Searchers of "SEO tools" are usually asking a number of similar questions:
How much does it cost? Free, plans and pricing, free trial
What kinds of tools are there? Link building, crawling, and indexing
Who are the tools for? Agency software, small business
How good are the tools? Best, endorsed by, customer review
By answering as many searcher questions as we can, we continue to build our
themed keyword concept.
Step 6: Can you rank? Getting strategic with competition
In this case, it's much better to go straight to the search engine results
page (SERP). This was covered in How to Rank, so let me plagiarize myself by
repeating the important points here.
You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:
Automated tools like Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool
Eyeballing the SERPs
If you have a paid subscription to Moz, or even a free trial, the Keyword
Difficulty Tool calculates â on a 100-point scale â a difficulty
score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.
If you run a full report you can break down the SERP for each keyword and
judge the individual strengths of each URL that ranks. You can even add your own
URL to see how you stack up.
Keyword phrases in the 60-100 range are typically very competitive, while
keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.
Manual method: the eyeball check
Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to
simply look at the top results currently ranking.
Run a non-personalized search query for your keywords. Examine the top few
results and ask yourself the following questions (SEO toolbars like the MozBar
or SEOquake can help speed up the process):
Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
What's the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
What's the inbound anchor text?
Can you build links and/or mentions around this keyword?
Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword than the top
ranking sites?
The last question is the most important: can you deliver higher quality
content for this keyword than the competition?
The answer must be yes if you expect to deserve to rank.
Step 7: Pulling it all together
By this point, you've probably analyzed hundreds or thousands of keywords
and organized them into themed, related groups.
You've found keywords that relate to your business or website, around which
you can create shareable content, with a high enough search volume, and that you
believe you can rank for.
Often, the keywords that you choose depend as much on your business or
website as they do on the competition. We chose the keywords above not only
because they relate to our primary keyword, but also because they relate to our
business. Google may rank keywords based on relevance, but only you can decide
if those keywords relate to your audience, product, and brand.
In the case of our "SEO Tools" example, our themed keyword list might look
like this.
Free SEO Tools
Best SEO Software
Keyword Research
Search Engine Optimization
Link Building Toolset
Best SEO Tools in 2013
Online Marketing
SEO for Google
Best SEO Tools for Agencies
Remember, we started with a very broad keyword. In practice, your final
keyword will be much more tightly focused.
We'll now use this list for creating content around our keyword theme. In a
future post, we'll discuss integrating these concepts for optimal on-page SEO.
Tips for scaling and large sites
The above method works if you're building out keyword lists for small to
medium sites, but scaling this process for large and enterprise sites requires a
different, more mathematical approach.
If you want to research tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of
keywords at a time, I highly recommend the looking into the following resources:
Grepwords â Keyword Suggestion API with search volume
SEOGadget for Excel â Link Research and Keyword Data. Integrates with
Grepwords and SEMRush
How to do Keyword Research for SEO â Written by Nick Eubanks, this $37
guide is well worth the money and offers a number of tips and tricks.
Conclusion
The above method is only one method of keyword research. There are hundreds
more and you'll likely invent your own method.
Regardless of the method you use, thinking about keywords in terms of
concepts and themes represents a hugely important step in content development.
What are your favorite keyword tips to organize content around concepts?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/jBR69uO8YoA/keywords-to-concepts
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Smart Keyword Research'
Posted by Cyrus-ShepardFrom keywords to concepts: the smart SEO's system for how
to do themed keyword research
If Google's Penguin update and Knowledge Graph have taught us anything, it's
that concepts have become more important than individual keywords for search
marketing.
Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds
keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every search begins with keywords. Over 5 billion Google searches a day.
Consider the following:
Google's entire business is based on selling keywords â over 40 billion
dollars a year, most of it from keyword sales through advertising.
(not provided) affects only post-click analytics. It doesn't influence the
pre-click keywords users type into search boxes.
Keywords and their meaning remain the primary input search engines use to
deliver answers to users (while other inputs such as location data and app
integration are on the rise).
Marketers who invest in smart keyword research will continue to have a huge
advantage over the competition.
The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.
From single keywords to themed concepts
When most of us first learned SEO, we learned to research one keyword at a
time. We optimized our page for that keyword by placing it in the title tag, in
the headline, a few times in the body, and maybe the alt text of a photo.
If we were really fancy we'd optimize a page for two keywords. Oh dear.
In truth, optimizing pages with a single keyword mentality hasn't worked
well for a long time.
Content today has to be about something.
The difference today from years past is the shift from individual keywords
to concepts. Concepts relate to search marketing in three primary ways:
1. What the user intends
Search engines try to better understand what the user asks by relating that
question to concepts. If I search for "movie about tiger on boat" Google will
likely understand that I am asking about the movie Life of Pi, not about pages
optimized for those specific keywords.
2. What your content is about
Search engines read the keywords on your pages to try and figure out what
those pages are conceptually about.
3. Relating concepts to one another
The Knowledge Graph shows us how Google relates concepts to each other. In
the case of Life of Pi, this may be showing how the film relates to ratings,
reviews, actors, writers, and the cast.
Keyword targeting: the dumb, hard way
In the post How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint, I first addressed the
concept of themed keyword research. The guide lists the biggest mistakes people
make when choosing keywords. Here's what we want to avoid:
Choosing keywords that are too broad
Keywords with too much competition
Keywords without enough trafficâ¨
Keywords that don't convert
Trying to rank for one keyword at a time
Instead, let's take the opposite approach.
The basic idea is that we're going to focus our content around ideas instead
of keywords, and thus give us the potential to rank for 100s or 1000s of
keywords at a time.
The smart system of themed keyword research
Let's explore a new way of thinking about keywords. It requires discarding
some of our old ideas and taking advantage of how Google may likely decide what
our content is about.
To accomplish this, we'll leverage some obvious truths about search traffic.
Truth #1: Over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from
keywords you didn't try to optimize for.
If you've ever seen a keyword report in your analytics platform or Google
Webmaster Tools, you know this is true.
What are these keywords? They may be synonyms, thematically related, or
closely related ideas that search engines thought best matched your content.
Sometimes they are way off base, but we won't concern ourselves with those.
With this in mind, optimizing for a only a single keyword means ignoring the
majority of your potential traffic.
Truth #2: Ranking number one is not a requirement for earning thousands of
visits.
Given what we know about point #1, it's often better to rank in position 2
or lower for hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords than it is to rank
number one for a single keyword.
Truth #3: The best keyword tools in the world will only show you a fraction
of the keywords you can potentially rank for.
Have you ever compared your long tail keyword data with data from Google's
own Keyword Planner?
Most of those keywords will show little potential search traffic or won't
even register, but you know this isn't true because these are the same keywords
that brought you traffic.
Relying on keyword research tools alone wont bring you to your full ranking
potential. You need content that fully explores your themed concepts.
Truth #4: Search engines sell keywords grouped into concepts and themes.
We can learn from this strategy.
When you purchase keywords through AdWords, Google suggests keywords to you
in tightly grouped themes and ideas. In fact, they do everything they can to
discourage you from bidding on individual keywords.
Of course, this is one way for Google to make more money, but it's also
because Google knows that concepts are often a better indicator of searcher
intent than individual keywords.
Part of this is due to the fact that 15% of all Google searches, or over
half a billion per day, have never been seen by before.
Now let's put these ideas into action.
Step 1: Gather your keyword seeds
Folks talk about different processes of keyword research depending on
whether you are going after
Traffic: good for pure pageviews and ad-based revenue sites, or
Conversions: for example, when you sell goods or services or need brand
awareness
Most of the time, you already have a good idea of what your keyword topic
broadly covers, especially if you're working with an established business or
website.
For our purposes, let's explore ideas around the keyword "seo tools" â
a term near and dear to our hearts here at Moz. In reality, this is an extremely
competitive keyword, and for your own research you'd likely want to begin with a
longer-tail, less competitive term.
Brainstorming
There are literally hundreds of keyword research tools out there to
experiment with, but a few SEO favorites include:
bersuggest
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Bing Keyword Tool
Keyword Spy
Wordstream
Google Display Planner
SEO Book keyword tools
Google Trends
Soovle
SEMrush
In the end, you will likely rely heavily on Google AdWords Keyword Planner,
but you never want to rely on it as your sole tool. It's best to explore and
play around with many tools to discover new ideas.
Here are keyword suggestions from Grepwords.
There are no rules except to have fun and try to discover new keywords you
haven't considered before.
Step 2: Get specific with modifiers
This is basic stuff, but it bears emphasizing: The more specific your
keywords, the easier it typically is to rank for those keywords.
Sure, it would be great to rank for the keyword "SEO tools" itself, but most
people aren't searching that way. Instead, they are likely looking for something
more specific.
Common keyword modifiers include:
Time and Date: "SEO Tools 2014"
Quality and/or Price: "Free SEO Tools", "Fastest SEO Tools"
Intent: "Buy SEO Tools", "Find SEO Tools"
Location: "SEO Tools Online", "Canadian SEO Tools"
Your chosen keyword research tools will uncover these and many more
qualifiers, but you'll want to include them in your searches as well.
Case Study: the $70,000 keyword modifier
Seasonal keywords are often super-effective. I discovered this myself a few
years ago as an independent SEO with the keyword "IRA contribution limits." The
keyword had good volume but was super-competitive, so I knew I was never going
to rank for it.
Using Google Trends, I found that usage for this keyword spiked at certain
times of the year, and that in fact people were looking for information for a
specific year, i.e. "IRA contribution limits 2012."
Using Google Trends is a great way to validate any keyword idea, as it will
often reveal hidden patterns and insight not present in other tools.
Armed with the new knowledge, I found many more date-specific keywords
themed around this topic and built an entire domain around them. Although it
took a lot of hard work, the site eventually drew tons of seasonal traffic and I
was able to sell the site with a significant profit.
It's a good idea to validate all your important keyword ideas through Google
Trends, as it will often reveal patterns and insights not present in other
keyword research tools.
Step 3: Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner
For small and medium-sized research jobs, nothing beats going directly to
Google's AdWords Keyword Tool for relevant suggestions and search volume. (For
larger and enterprise-type projects, see the alternatives at the end of the
post.)
This is basic stuff, but you'll want to search for New Keyword and Adgroup
Ideas and head straight to the to the Keyword Ideas tab. For a more complete
guide to using the planner, Kristi Hines wrote a great guide here.
Hint: While most seasoned SEOs skip over the Ad Groups tab, there's a
wealth of ideas there tightly grouped into themed keywords â exactly what
we are looking for!
Traditionally, marketers use Google's keyword tool because of search volume
and competition scores, but most web marketers underplay one of the most
powerful features of this tool: the ability to sort keyword suggestions by
relevance.
This gives us a huge advantage in creating themed keyword lists, and helps
us create more targeted content.
Because the top suggestions often contain your core keywords, it's helpful
to use negative keywords to discover more variation.
Step 4: Defining the concepts further
Now that you have your basic keyword idea, the next step is creating your
keyword theme by finding keywords that are conceptually related.
There are several ways to do this. For our example of "SEO tools" let's try
the popular methods to build out our themed list.
Google's Related Searches
At the bottom of most Google results is a section called Related Searches.
This is a gold mine of conceptually related concepts.
By clicking through the results and then examining those related searches
(and repeating this process over and over) you can quickly find many long-tail
opportunities much easier than using Google's AdWords Keyword Planner.
Google Trends
At the bottom of each trends report is a "Related Searches" section that can
be used to discover conceptually related queries.
Wikistalker
This cool tool introduced to me by Peter Bray "illustrates the relations
between different things by visualizing the semantic relevance between the
inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia entry articles."
So if we search Wikistalker for "Search Engine Optimization" it shows us the
following Wikipedia articles with the highest semantic relevance.
Internet Marketing: 85% relevant
Google Webmaster Tools: 70% relevant
Marketing: 59% relevant
Other tools
In fact, many other keyword research tools like Deeperweb Search, SEMRush,
YouTube Analytics or WordStream can help you discover related keyword phrases.
Step 5: Empathy, your secret keyword weapon
Ask yourself what a visitor wants to find on this page.
As Rand explains in this excellent Whiteboard Friday, putting yourself in
the visitor's shoes and anticipating their needs provides a wealth of
conceptually related keyword ideas.
Searchers of "SEO tools" are usually asking a number of similar questions:
How much does it cost? Free, plans and pricing, free trial
What kinds of tools are there? Link building, crawling, and indexing
Who are the tools for? Agency software, small business
How good are the tools? Best, endorsed by, customer review
By answering as many searcher questions as we can, we continue to build our
themed keyword concept.
Step 6: Can you rank? Getting strategic with competition
In this case, it's much better to go straight to the search engine results
page (SERP). This was covered in How to Rank, so let me plagiarize myself by
repeating the important points here.
You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:
Automated tools like Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool
Eyeballing the SERPs
If you have a paid subscription to Moz, or even a free trial, the Keyword
Difficulty Tool calculates â on a 100-point scale â a difficulty
score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.
If you run a full report you can break down the SERP for each keyword and
judge the individual strengths of each URL that ranks. You can even add your own
URL to see how you stack up.
Keyword phrases in the 60-100 range are typically very competitive, while
keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.
Manual method: the eyeball check
Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to
simply look at the top results currently ranking.
Run a non-personalized search query for your keywords. Examine the top few
results and ask yourself the following questions (SEO toolbars like the MozBar
or SEOquake can help speed up the process):
Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
What's the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
What's the inbound anchor text?
Can you build links and/or mentions around this keyword?
Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword than the top
ranking sites?
The last question is the most important: can you deliver higher quality
content for this keyword than the competition?
The answer must be yes if you expect to deserve to rank.
Step 7: Pulling it all together
By this point, you've probably analyzed hundreds or thousands of keywords
and organized them into themed, related groups.
You've found keywords that relate to your business or website, around which
you can create shareable content, with a high enough search volume, and that you
believe you can rank for.
Often, the keywords that you choose depend as much on your business or
website as they do on the competition. We chose the keywords above not only
because they relate to our primary keyword, but also because they relate to our
business. Google may rank keywords based on relevance, but only you can decide
if those keywords relate to your audience, product, and brand.
In the case of our "SEO Tools" example, our themed keyword list might look
like this.
Free SEO Tools
Best SEO Software
Keyword Research
Search Engine Optimization
Link Building Toolset
Best SEO Tools in 2013
Online Marketing
SEO for Google
Best SEO Tools for Agencies
Remember, we started with a very broad keyword. In practice, your final
keyword will be much more tightly focused.
We'll now use this list for creating content around our keyword theme. In a
future post, we'll discuss integrating these concepts for optimal on-page SEO.
Tips for scaling and large sites
The above method works if you're building out keyword lists for small to
medium sites, but scaling this process for large and enterprise sites requires a
different, more mathematical approach.
If you want to research tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of
keywords at a time, I highly recommend the looking into the following resources:
Grepwords â Keyword Suggestion API with search volume
SEOGadget for Excel â Link Research and Keyword Data. Integrates with
Grepwords and SEMRush
How to do Keyword Research for SEO â Written by Nick Eubanks, this $37
guide is well worth the money and offers a number of tips and tricks.
Conclusion
The above method is only one method of keyword research. There are hundreds
more and you'll likely invent your own method.
Regardless of the method you use, thinking about keywords in terms of
concepts and themes represents a hugely important step in content development.
What are your favorite keyword tips to organize content around concepts?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/jBR69uO8YoA/keywords-to-concepts
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] How to Build a Content Calendar (Plus a Free Template for 2014)
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'How to Build a Content Calendar
(Plus a Free Template for 2014)'
Creating a content calendar for your company from scratch is one of those tasks
that seems ridiculously complicated at the outset but which, with a systematic
approach and no scruples about stealing other peoples methods, can actually be
fairly straightforward. We have no problems with other people borrowing our
methods we wanted to offer a []How to Build a Content Calendar (Plus a Free
Template for 2014) is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy
and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/how-to-build-a-content-calendar-plus-a-free-template-for-2014/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-build-a-content-calendar-plus-a-free-template-for-2014
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
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peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
(Plus a Free Template for 2014)'
Creating a content calendar for your company from scratch is one of those tasks
that seems ridiculously complicated at the outset but which, with a systematic
approach and no scruples about stealing other peoples methods, can actually be
fairly straightforward. We have no problems with other people borrowing our
methods we wanted to offer a []How to Build a Content Calendar (Plus a Free
Template for 2014) is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy
and Content Marketing Strategy
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